How To Get iOS 10-Like Home Screen Widgets In iOS 9

Although iOS 10 isn’t the big revamp many users were hoping it might be, it does bring several new features and changes to the table. The first developer beta of the Apple’s latest mobile OS is out and about and the public beta is soon to follow. Moreover, it seems one developer has already succeeded in finding a vulnerability within the firmware that can be employed for a jailbreak.

If you’d rather not wait until the final build of iOS 10 is released – most likely some time in September, following the announcement of the next iPhone – and subsequently jailbroken, there is a way you can get your hands on some of those features. The Cydia store has already begun doling out system tweaks that seem to have been inspired by iOS 10. If your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch is still jailbroken on iOS 9.x and you wish to get a taste of what’s to come without actually having to update and lose your jailbreak in the process, there is one particular tweak we believe you should try. It’s called Gazelle.

Developed by CP Digital Darkroom, this gem of a Cydia tweak might not necessarily have been inspired from the 3D Touch-powered Home screen widgets in iOS 10, but it certainly works the same way. You interact with the app icons on your Home screen to view a summary of salient, interactive info from within the app. Instead of a hard-press, however, widgets are invoked by performing one of five different activation gestures on an app’s icon, the default gesture being a simple upward swipe across the icon. You can switch between gestures and configure widgets from the preferences menu Gazelle adds for itself within the Settings app.

For every app, you have the option to have all their notifications displayed in a little pop-up that the tweak calls the Gazelle Notifications View, and for a limited number of stock and third-party apps, you also get special widgets made just for them. The Clock app, for example, can display a list of all active alarms, Music brings up playback and volume controls, App Store offers a quick way to search for new apps to install, the Cydia icon shows a list of all recent additions to the store’s repositories, and the Camera app displays a mini-viewfinder complete with a capture button as well as a front/rear camera toggle. Some of these widgets even come with their own settings, which can be accessed from the View Configuration section within Gazelle’s preferences.

Our favorite is the Gazelle Settings View, which is basically a smaller, trimmed down version of the Control Center. Redditors might be interested to know that the tweak comes packed with a dedicated widget for the official Reddit app for iOS as well.

You can, of course, only have one of the two views enabled at a time for a single app. Interestingly, you can have any app’s dedicated widget or “View” assigned to any app of choice, which is to say you could have the Google Maps icon display the dedicated mini-map widget designed for the stock Maps app or assign Gazelle’s YouTube widget to the stock Videos app.

As mentioned earlier, the widgets in the tweak’s arsenal are limited for now, but it seems Gazelle will be open to third-party add-ons, which means you will be able to add more widgets to the tweak from the Cydia store over time.

Gazelle is currently available for free on the CP Digital Darkroom repository at repo.cpdigitaldarkroom.com and though its description doesn’t mention anything in regard to its status, a Reddit thread by the developer implies the tweak is still in its beta testing phase.There is no indication as to when it’ll be making its way to the BigBoss repository, if ever, and whether it’ll remain free when it does. The tweak is compatible with iOS 9, iOS 8 and 7, and according to the developer, should also work with iOS 10 when a working jailbreak is released for it, of course.

I'm an engineer, blogger, and graphic designer who loves creating and experimenting with different forms of online content when he's not looking for a mix of inspiration and escape in PC gaming, comic books and anime. You can find me on Twitter and Google+.